Liner Notes from the DVD-A of Brain Salad Surgery - written by
Jerry McCulley

"Rock critics and rock musicians think of Emerson, Lake & Palmer
as pompous and pretentious," a gleeful Carl Palmer, drummer extraordinaire,
explains. "Which we are! We're not a straightforward rock band - we are a
saber-rattling band!" So much for regrets.

If you're looking for safe, critic-approved, politically correct pop
music enlightenment, boy did you get the wrong catalog number. (1971-77)
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - ELP to you - were perennial contenders for Most
Critically Reviled Rock Band on the Planet. But in 1973 and '74, only The
Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin were bigger concert draws - and
none of them were playing Copland, Mussorgsky, Ginastera, or Brubeck. Or
anything remotely resembling ELP's own complex, manic - and yes - bombastic,
largely Hammond- and Moog-driven compositions, for that matter.

The fourth studio album by the union of keyboard prodigy/The Nice
alumnus/world-class showman Keith Emerson, seraphim-voiced King Crimson refugee
Greg Lake, and Crazy World of Arthur Brown/Atomic Rooster survivor Carl Palmer,
the Buddy Rich of Birmingham (UK), Brain Salad Surgery is arguably
the band's finest album, and one of the much misunderstood prog rock era's
defining works. The title came courtesy of flamboyant former Atlantic Records
promo man cum ELP road manager/Manticore Records president Mario Medious
(a black martial arts enthusiast whose Manticore memo pads were inscribed
"HNIC" - "Head Nigger in Charge"!) Medious had nicked the title from a slang
lyric in Dr. John's 1973 hit "Right Place Wrong Time" to replace the album's
quaint working moniker, Whip Some Skull On Yer (if further explanation
is required, check your Webster's under "fellatio").

Building on the momentum of their eponymous debut in the UK (September
1970), Tarkus (June 1971), Pictures at an Exhibition (November,
1971, originally UK only), Trilogy (August 1972), and the band's seemingly
relentless cycle of rehearsal and touring, BSS represents the most
crystalline example of ELP's tensile amalgam of jazz, classical, folk, and
rock influences and, notes Greg Lake frankly, perhaps the band's most satisfying
period of collaboration. "The days in which Brain Salad Surgery was
made were what I would term 'the healthy days' of ELP. As opposed to when
everything became fragmented, compartmentalized, and ego-driven."

"A lot of the good stuff on Brain Salad Surgery happened at a
point when our creativity was at its very best," concurs Carl Palmer. "We've
never really topped that era."

Though barely two years old, ELP was already filling arenas in America
and stadiums in the UK and Europe. By the end of 1972, the band's success
had enabled Emerson, Lake & Palmer to negotiate their own label imprint,
Manticore Records, and turn an abandoned Odeon cinema in Fulham, London,
into a multilevel rehearsal and production facility, Manticore Studios. "After
Trilogy we toured extensively," notes Lake, "and I think we undertook
a search for ideas. Rather than the way that the first albums had been made,
which was very much a question of each person sitting in their own room thinking
of ideas in solitude, I think Brain Salad Surgery represented creating
an album out of a collective inspiration. That was the motivation behind
buying this cinema to rehearse in, to try and do something with more of a
live, rather than preconceived, feel."

But, admits Keith Emerson, there were practical concerns as well: "We'd
been looking for ages for someplace to rehearse. We were playing in little
church halls and had the local neighbors complaining that it was too loud.
One guy even complained that when he sat in the bath, we were causing the
water to produce waves." He sent 'round a local copper and a petition and
that was it, we were out of that place. It got impossible; we played in the
back of a restaurant where mice were running around chewing the cables."

The converted theatre quickly became the focal point of ELP's writing
and rehearsing of the new material, as well as preparing its ever expanding
stage show. "I recall that [BSS] was rehearsed upstairs in the foyer,
as it were," Carl Palmer remembers. "The downstairs area was used for bands
[Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull among them] to go through production rehearsals;
we rented that part of it out. We stored our own equipment downstairs, and
then we had our workshop and rehearsal facilities upstairs. In the back of
the balcony area, where the concession stand would be, is where we
rehearsed."

Peter Sinfield, a compatriot of Greg Lake from his King Crimson days,
was soon brought under Manticore's wing to both complete the solo album he'd
started and add his unique articulation to the lyrics for the new album.
By early 1973, ELP had worked up the complex arrangements of "Karn Evil 9:1st
Impression" and "Toccata" sufficiently enough to try them out before live
audiences on the five-week European tour they were preparing to embark on
at the end of March. Most of the album was recorded at Advision studios in
August and September, produced by Greg Lake, with Geoff Young and Chris Kimsey
handling the engineering. "Nothing came quickly," recalls Lake of the album's
intensive rehearsals and sessions. "It really was laborious, most of it.
It was very much like building a house one brick at a time. And sometimes
you'd put up a wall and take the whole bloody thing down again. It was a
laborious and complicated process. And it was complicated because we were
searching, that's the truth of it."

But, recalls Greg Lake with amusement, the band weren't the only ones
doing the searching. "I remember being in that converted cinema one night
when the customs and excise people came rushing in and proceeded to tell
us that we were under arrest - for drug smuggling! We thought it was one
of those strip-o-gram, practical joke kind of things. They said, 'We know
there's been drugs smuggled in your equipment,' and we told them, 'You must
be out of your minds, we don't even do drugs.' We lied a bit! They said,
'We've got two of your people locked up in prison, and we're here to search
the equipment.' We told them to search all they wanted. The bottom line was
that a couple of guys who organized the transportation of our gear had actually
been drug smugglers! They had built secret compartments into our road boxes
and were smuggling cocaine. And there we were in this bloody theatre with
all these customs police around us. Frightening!"

No charges were brought against the band, and the incident still remains
something of a troubling mystery in Lake's mind: "The authorities never told
us the exact outcome of their investigation. I believe one roadie ended up
in prison, and the other essentially vanished I'd heard the police believed
he'd had plastic surgery and fled to South America. We never really got the
whole story."

Brain Salad Surgery opens with ELP's take on "Jerusalem," "which
is basically a hymn that everybody sang in school and is played at the end
of every Royal Albert Hall Promenade concert in England," notes Keith Emerson.
With suitably Anglo-centric, Christian-mythic lyrics by poet William Blake,
it had long since become a revered British anthem second only to "God Save
The King." ELP's arrangement was both stately and restrained, but such was
the institutional reverence for the hoary hymn that "Jerusualem" was nonetheless
rejected as a single release - largely, the band claims, due to conservative
and hypersensitive grumblings from the BBC.

"I actually first attempted to do a version of 'Jerusalem' with The Nice",
recalls Emerson, "but the rhythmic element never came together satisfactorily.
Both Greg and I wee very fond of the song." Or at least most of it, opines
Greg Lake: "The lyrics are very bland except for one line, 'Bring me my bow
of burning gold/Bring me my arrows of desire.' The rest of the song was all
waffle. But when it came to that line, it was a moment that you had to sing
the song for."

Notably, the track features the debut of the prototype Moog Apollo, the
first-ever polyphonic synthesizer. "I don't like putting myself across as
'Yeah, I was the first to do this!'" Keith Emerson insists. "I was just pleased
to have a close working relationship with [synthesizer pioneer] Bob Moog,
who recognized me as the first musician brave enough to take his beasts on
the road."

"Toccata," Keith Emerson's ferocious adaptation of the fourth movement
of modern Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera's 1st Piano Concerto, 4th
Movement (with a "percussion movement" credited to Carl Palmer) represents
on of the band's finest efforts at classical/rock synthesis. "I originally
head the Ginastera piece when I was with my former band, The Nice," Emerson
recalls. " We were playing in Los Angeles, doing one of these television
spectaculars with a big orchestra, and while I was down in the dressing room,
I heard these incredible sounds."

"I ran upstairs and a pianist was hammering away at the piano; I grabbed
him afterwards and said, "what the hell was that you were playing?! It turned
out to be the Ginastera piano concerto. When I heard Ginastera, I understood
where some of Leonard Bernstein's music had come from, it evoked all of West
Side Story.

"When I got back to England, I bought the music and went through it.
It was a part of my music appreciation; I guess it's provided inspiration
for other works I've written." Indeed, Emerson had enthused about the concerto
and his hopes to record it in interviews as early as 1971. "But I didn't
really think seriously about playing it with the band until Carl said that
he wanted to have a drum solo which would be a little different than just
putting it on to the end of another number. I rang him on the phone and played
it for him, and he said, 'That's amazing!' We had a group rehearsal and I
played it for both of them on the organ, and that was the start of it."

"We'd pushed it to the limit," Keith says of the band's adventurous musical
stance in early 1973, "and I thought the fourth [studio] album was the time
to try and approach this piece of music. It was very testing for all of us.
Greg didn't read music, and Carl read it to a certain extent, but he wasn't
able to apply piano music to paying drums. So it was really like going through
the whole thing bar by bar. It was music by mathematics for them. Carl learned
it really by counting, and if you watch any videos of ELP playing 'Toccata',
you'll see his lips move as he's counting: '1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8!'" Though "Toccata"
had received onstage workout on the European tour, it didn't receive Carl
Palmer's crowning flourish until being recorded at Advision in September.

"'Toccata' was the first recording where we used electronic drums," Carl
Palmer recalls. "Drum synthesizers didn't exist then, so we hired a guy named
Nick Rose from the University of Electronics in London. He came up with an
idea that would enable me to trigger electronic sounds from a normal drum
by placing another microphone inside the drum, apart from the mike which
picked up the acoustic signal. In doing that it would trigger a small synthesizer
the size of a cigar box. There were eight little 'cigar box' synthesizers
which were preprogrammed; you couldn't really change the sound of them, except
with an octave divider switch which I had on the floor. I could punch it
in to change the sound.

"In the middle of 'Toccata' there's a section with all these 'atmospheric'
sounds. Everybody would automatically think it was the keyboard, and even
to this day a lot of people aren't aware it was drums. But it was totally
unreliable, you couldn't really move it from one end of the room to the other
without it going wrong, so it was really hell to tour with."

Greg Lake recalls "Toccata" as a good example of the dilemma he often
faced in his dual role as both band member and ELP's producer: "It was a
piece of music conceived to be performed by an orchestra. When you reduce
it down to three people, you've got a problem. You can imagine: you've got
a percussive element, a melodic element, and a harmonic element. Who carries
what to the best advantage? That's the real issue. I know from producing
all the early ELP records that that is the essence of any interpretation
by a small number of people of a piece written for a larger number of people.
Then comes the question of overdubs: you can track and track until you've
got a hundred-piece orchestra, but then you come to the question: 'How do
we do it live?' So you think, if we're going to make this record, maybe we'd
better make it so that we can record it live. You come down to trying to
work out an arrangement in which three people can perform a symphony, or
a classical piece of music, live. That's the arrangement you end up with."

But "Toccata" was fraught with more than mere musical complexity. "It
suddenly came to our consideration," says Emerson, "do we have the rights
to put this music on our new album? I called up Ginastera's publishers, and
their initial reaction was 'Sorry, Ginastera will not allow any adaptation
of his music. If you care to call him, here's his number.' I phoned him in
Geneva and his wife, Aurora, said, 'You must come to Geneva - tomorrow,'
so I rang up my manager and said, 'We're off to Geneva tomorrow!' We flew
to Geneva, then drove up to his apartment block. The maid let us in, and
we walked through a lavish hall setting and into the living room. There,
standing at attention and dressed in a suit, almost like a bank manager,
was Alberto Ginastera, ready to receive us. I was very nervous meeting the
guy. Here's an international composer, very well respected and her is, in
his eye, a rock 'n' roll band playing his music.

"We desperately needed to get 'Toccata' on Brain Salad Surgery If we
didn't the release date would have had to have been pushed back, and we'd
have had to come up with another idea. It really all hung on the permission
of Ginastera and his publishers.

"I discussed with him what I'd done, then held my breath and let him
listen to it. He played it on a tape recorder, and after the first five or
six bars, he switched the tape recorder off and looked across at his wife
in sort of disbelief and said, 'Diabolic!' I thought he meant it was diabolical
- that it was bad! Because he'd been playing the tape recorder in mono, and
we had a stereo tape, I jumped up and switched the deck to stereo. But he
wasn't concentrating on that, he was completely bewildered by the music.
He wound it back to the beginning and played it again. At the end, he said,
"That's incredible! You've captured the essence of my music, and nobody's
ever done that before.' I didn't know what to say; I could've fallen through
the floor. At that moment nothing else mattered to me. The other criticisms
of the band meant absolutely nothing."

But Ginastera's permission to release "Toccata" wasn't the only fortuitous
element Brain Salad Surgery gleaned from Switzerland that year. Prior to
recording the album, ELP had played Zurich in mid-April, and a Swiss business
associate of the band eagerly introduced Keith Emerson to a popular local
artist, H.R. Giger.

"He was an extraordinary, fascinating person." Keith Emerson says of
meeting the airbrush surrealist and master of the macabre. "But he lived
his life on another level. He was obsessed with surgical procedures, skin
diseases, unborn fetuses. I went back to the hotel and said to Greg and Carl,
'You've got to come meet this guy, he's weird!' They were a little reluctant
to do so, as anything apart from music, such as art direction, they wanted
to have some control over. Amazingly, they came."

"As I recall," a still bemused Carl Palmer recalls, "Giger had an electric
chair in the hall and a couple of arms hanging on the wall which were joined
together at the elbow with a syringe coming out of it. You have to understand
that Giger really wasn't known then, Alien wasn't out. He was known in Zurich
and the depths of the art world, but he wasn't a household name outside of
Switzerland. He wasn't very talkative, but he was keen on the group's music.
The meeting was very brief, we were in and out in an hour and a half. And
the first thing he produced is what you see on the cover."

"Giger's wife was the model for the inside cover," Keith Emerson says
of the woman who committed suicide not long after. "Her lips keep reappearing
in his artwork, even after her death."

"The mid-'70s were full of attempts to shock the public," Emerson says
of the band's choice of artist. "You'd do it on the stage, in artwork, and
do it in your music; try to push the limits. We chose this artwork because
it pushed album cover art to its extreme." But the band soon found they'd
gotten more extremity than they'd bargained for; Giger's original ghostly
woman cover image featured one of the artist's recurring motifs situated
just beneath her chin - an erect penis.

"We presented the whole 'Full Monty' to our record company in England,"
a chuckling Keith Emerson recalls, "and they came back and said we can't
print that because its pornographic. We had to get back to Giger and say,
'Thank you for agreeing to supply us the art work, but we're going to have
to get rid of that penis!' The conversation was quite funny" 'I'm not going
to get rid of the penis! The penis is part of the picture!' He finally relented
and we had a very adept artist turn the penis into a shaft of glowing
light!"

On ELP's tour that spring, Greg Lake had been trying out a pair of new
acoustic ballads, "You Can Sing My Song" and "Still You Turn Me On."
The latter was recorded at Advision in September, becoming the latest example
of ELP's successful formula for relieving the otherwise manic dynamics of
its albums ("Lucky Man" on their debut, "From The Beginning" on Trilogy).
Lake says almost dismissively, "It used to be a thing where as a balance
to the record I would write an acoustic song." Ironically, Lake's ballads,
the least typical aspect of ELP's music, often garnered the band their greatest
airplay and widest public exposure.

"We've had success through Greg's ballads," notes Carl Palmer. "Without
those we probably wouldn't have sold the amount of records that we have.
The problem was when we had something which was a commercial hit, it wasn't
dark. We had love songs that were hits, so it was a rather diverse situation;
people were always waiting for the next 'C'est La Vie', 'Lucky Man' "Still
Your Turn Me On," or "From the Beginning.'"

"Still You Turn Me On" was an obvious single choice, but the band
nixed its release, both because Palmer didn't play on the track and because
the band felt it didn't fairly represent the album or the band's general
direction. Manticore nonetheless pressed up single copies of "Still "
for radio stations to distribute free of charge to fans.

"Benny The Bouncer" a good-natured honky-tonker also featuring the new
Moog Apollo, represented yet another aspect of ELP's album formula. "You
know what happens," says Lake, "you make your first album, and you look at
the tracks from your first album that were a success, and you say maybe we
should adhere to a formula that was successful. There's no disgrace in repeating
the formula, providing the quality and artistry of it are sound. 'Benny The
Bouncer' was done in the tradition of [Trilogy's] 'The Sheriff' or
'Are You Ready Eddy!' [from Tarkus] - an amusement."

"'Benny the Bouncer' is like a vaudeville song," notes lyricist Peter
Sinfield. "Those kinds of songs were almost an apology for the rest of the
bombast, the huge we-will-play-bigger-and-faster-and-better-than-everyone-else
sentiment. That, with Greg's folk songs, somehow balanced it out."

"Pete was always in the background ever since the demise of King Crimson,"
Keith Emerson says of Sinfield's relationship with ELP. "He'd actually started
off doing the lights for King Crimson and gradually got drawn in to contribute
to the lyrics. He was always part of Greg's past."

"Actually, I started off as Ian McDonald's songwriter partner," corrects
Peter Sinfield. "After he joined Giles, Giles & Fripp with Greg Lake
(to form King Crimson), I hang around during rehearsals writing words - before,
after, and along with all the music. In between I did the sound, built the
lights, fetched, carried, and did a spot of coproduction; anything to be
part of that extraordinary ensemble. Greg was there and we did the fairly
infamous first album The Court Of The Crimson King. It's very peculiar
going from lyric-writing-roadie to jack-of-all-trades co-owner of a band,
which is what I did!"

"I was halfway through making a solo album when I got a call from Gregory,
who flattered and seduced me," Sinfield remembers, "So I said I'd finish
my solo album with him." But there was a catch: "Greg said, 'You have to
help me with this thing I've started", which in the end turned out to be
"Karn Evil 9."

"'Karn Evil 9' was a logical extension of 'Tarkus', the first ELP 'epic,'"
Keith Emerson says of the three-part suite that comprises nearly two-thirds
of the album. "But whereas 'Tarkus' was my dabbling in fourths and fifths,
'Karn Evil 9' dealt with counterpoint, which has always been a fascinating
vehicle for me to try and write in. The beginning of "Karn Evil 9' is
counterpoint - but then I gave up!

"The moment I got together with Greg and Carl, they said, 'That's very
clever - now let's get on with the song!' So you'd be promptly shoved forward.
I'd go into the studio and kind of take my lead from Duke Ellington, another
one of my heroes, he'd get into the studio and dish out the parts, and if
a certain musician is coming through with a certain idea, he'd change right
away - 'you play that, that's good!' Even though I went into the rehearsals
with a set idea, if something happened in the studio I'd say, 'Great! Let's
use that."

Not surprisingly, the three-part musical centerpiece of Brain Salad Surgery
was also the subject of the album's initial recording sessions ("1st Impression"
at Olympic Studios, London, in June; "2nd Impression" and "3rd Impression"
at Advision in August). But, notes Keith Emerson, the thematic concerns of
"Karn Evil 9" had undergone nearly as much evolution as its music: "The actual
title was probably Pete Sinfield's. I had this idea about a planet that I
wanted to call 'Ganton 9.' And Pete said you can't call it that, 'cause there's
a Ganton Street in Soho, just down the road! Pete listened to the music I'd
written and said it sounds like a carnival - it's all happy! So we went carnival,
hmm, Karn Evil. Bang! That's it - end of story!"

Emerson's initial concept concerned a planet to which all manner of evil
and decadence had been banished. "Yes", chuckles Sinfield when reminded of
Keith's original notion. "it's called 'Earth!'" Sinfield, who has since teamed
with Andy Hill to become a successful - if unlikely - writer of pop songs
and ballads for the like of Cher ("Heart of Stone"), Diana Ross, and Celine
Dion (Think Twice", a #1 hit in eight countries), claims an unlikely source
of inspiration for the lyrics to "Karn Evil 9" - musical satirist/Harvard
professor Tom Lehrer. "Lehrer is a big hero of mine, and I can hear little
bits of Lehrer and pieces of Vonnegut and other things that I've absorbed
along the way. The best bit in it is "Welcome back, my friends, to the show
that never ends ' which ELP of course used for years."

And if one doubts the prophetic power of Lake's and Sinfield's lyrics,
ponder "Where the seeds have withered, silent children shiver in the cold/Now
their faces captured in the lenses of the jackals for gold" during the next
media foray into Bosnia or the South Bronx. Or consider "Performing on a
stool, we've a sight to make you drool, seven virgins and a mule" when sampling
the exploitative TV wares of Jerry, Jenny, Montel et al.

Carl Palmer remembers that the band's converted cinema played a crucial
role in the development of "1st Impression": "When we played it, it happened
to be a very big-time, explosive arrangement. The reason was 'Karn Evil9'
was one of the things we rehearsed downstairs on the main stage, because
nobody was renting it. We'd been playing it upstairs in the smaller room
for about a week or so; out of the blue we decided to take the gear downstairs
and try playing this particular piece down there. On the big stage it just
took off!"

After the piano and percussion interlude in "2nd Impression", "Karn Evil
9" took what turned out to be another prophetic turn. "I had this idea of
a computer theme which was not there originally," Sinfield recalls of "3rd
Impression." Keith wrote the rest of the music around that idea, that's my
recollection. He had bits and pieces of music, and that's where I cam up
with this idea of man and what he'd invented and how it ironically takes
him over.

Rather like [chess master] Gary Kasparov and the computer - which [unlike
the protagonist of "3rd Impression"] Kasparov beat by the way!"

"I spent six years in computers before I became a songwriter," Sinfield
says, explaining part of the inspiration for the final movement of "Karn
Evil 9". "I think they were IBM 360s, massive things like you see in the
old '50s films with the tape going 'round. It had 64K of memory, which is
not a lot really. We used to be able to fuck up the program by putting it
into a loop so we could continue our poker game I've always been fascinated
with artificial intelligence versus natural intelligence because one is born
of the other, and it goes around in an odd circle."

Keith Emerson's brief career in banking also involved computers - and
his own rationale for cyber-sabotage. "I used to put nicks in the punch cards,
and while they were sorting that out I'd go chat up the typists in the next
room. But it was reading Melody Maker on the job that got me fired!"

"The whole premise of 'Karn Evil 9' was the influence that computers
would have upon civilization," claims Greg Lake. "Now that sounds extremely
passe; everybody's got a laptop now. But at that time no one had computers.
There were lines like 'Load your program/I am yourself' that were extremely
prophetic, because now of course you do have programs that are yourself,
that are customized to you. But at that time computers were used almost
exclusively in banks or institutions. The concept of a personal computer
was barely dreamt of."

"It was the start of computer technology, and already we were being accused
of using computer technology in our instrumentation to the point that some
people actually believed that when we played onstage it wasn't us!" notes
Keith Emerson. "That's why I programmed the Moog to get into a sequence a
the end of 'Karn Evil 9'. When we did it live I had the moog turn around,
face the audience, and blow up [courtesy of pyrotechnic charges] while we
left the stage. It was like saying, "This is computer technology and it's
taking over.' You've got to understand that when that was coming out Johnny
Rotten was looking at it and saying, "This is something we don't want to
be part of!'"

"ELP was so bloody dark and aggressive," Greg Lake says with relish.
"When the whole punk rock thing came out we used to laugh at them. Because
if you're taking about aggression - real aggression - that's ELP. This was
a truly aggressive band; aggressive to each other, aggressive in the music,
aggressive in performance, aggressive in stage production. It makes Johnny
Rotten look like a fucking walk in the part!" Emerson expresses unusual fondness
for thelate-'70s punks who delighted in savaging his own music, but is still
bemused by the type the spiked hair and safety-pin set got for their antics:
"Particularly so when we'd all done it ourselves, all the throwing up in
airports and that sort of stuff. We were far worse than the Sex Pistols.
Far worse!"

By the time Brain Salad Surgery was released in America on November
19, 1973, ELP were already back on the road in America, hauling with them
what was then the largest and most elaborate stage, sound, and lighting system
to date in rock - all 36 tons of it! Carried in the band's semi-trailers
was the first discrete quadraphonic PA system, driven by a 30-channel board,
a massive four-laddered lighting proscenium, and some of the most spectacular
musical equipment yet produced.

For some of the larger gigs, Keith Emerson piloted a 'flying piano' rig
that levitated the instrument, then spun it in 360-degree loops! "It was
the decadent '70's," says Carl Palmer of his contribution of the band's cartage.
"I got approached by British Steel, who asked if I wanted some help making
drum cylinders, which they did. Because they were steel, they could've been
an eighth of an inch thick, that would have been plenty. When they turned
up they were half an inch thick! It took two people to lift the bass drum.
Then we started dealing with reinforced stages to take the weight of it,
because none of us ever thought of the transportation problems. It weighed
a ton and a half, I think. But that was including the rostrum (which revolved),
two large gongs, and a 16-inch diameter church bell." The steel megaset currently
resides in a small building on Ringo Starr's English estate.

Brain Salad Surgery and its accompanying 1973-74 world tour turned
out to be the high-water mark of ELP's career. Engineers from Wally Heider
Recording Studios capture the band's February 1974 dates at the Anaheim
(California) Convention Center for their three-LP Welcome Back, My Friends,
To The Show That Never Ends - Ladies and Gentlemen, and the band concluded
their American tour by headlining the California Jam before some 200,000
people.

"In terms of personal, emotional intensity I doubt those shows will ever
be surpassed," Greg Lake says proudly. "I've been onstage when there were
moments when the intensity was 100 percent, and you can't communicate with
an audience any more than that. It's balls to the wall. That was the majesty
and impressiveness of ELP. It was a strange band because it had the capacity
to deliver this sort of impact. But it also had the flaws and weaknesses
that allowed light to shine through."